I was doing sewing machine drills today and noticed that I was actually faster doing the drill then when swimming normally. I think its because my arm is entering the water in the catch position already right as my other arm is finishing pulling, so there is no break in the power.
This is in stark contrast to some advice I received from a well respected coach who said to work on reaching as far forward as possible to maximise the length of the catch.
So which is it? Does your reach increase the faster you go (indicating targeting a specific cadence is more important)?
Do a search on here for page upon page of discussion of it. Basically it is:
You float face down with your arms out at 90* and your elbows bent so your hands hang straight down towards the bottom of the pool. You swim by lifting an arm straight out of the water until just your fingertips are still wet and bring it forward as far as you can while keeping your forearm vertical (about the top of your head), then plunge it straight down until your elbow is at the surface. You pull back just past the 90* point where you started and recover.
When people “stretch” out their stroke I notice a lot of them hold out their hands in a “stop sign” like position. (tell someone to talk to the hand…and that’s what I see.) If you do that while stretching out your stroke…you are pushing against yourself with every stroke. You want your hand to cut the water like a knife.
You really really need to watch that hand position and concentrate on really pulling during that first part of the stroke when it’s lengthened…otherwise you negate the longer stroke completely.
That is why a lot of new swimmers feel better in the water with a short choppy stroke. Their hand entry isn’t correct and slows them down.
When I swim with a longer stroke, my hand enters the water fingers first with my thumb pointing down just before I hit full extension. Once I hit full extension, I rotate my arm to put my hand in the proper plane as I pull my elbow back into the catch position. What I find though is that there is a dead spot between full extension and when my catch actually starts. When I do the sewing machine drill, this dead spot is gone, as my arm is entering the water in the high elbow position already.
If you watch Grant Hackett’s catch, that’s what I’m doing (well, not quite like he does it, but that same style) and you can see the dead spot I’m talking about.
I don’t think I can provide any more advice w/out actually seeing your stroke. THe most common thing I see is hand position…if that’s not your problem than there isn’t much I can do from here. Do you work on “over the barrel” with your stroke and getting a good scull out in front of you to catch the water?
But let’s be reasonable here…if you had grant hacketts catch/stroke you’d be telling me how to swim better.
Did I mention I have Michael Phelp’s stroke?
haha, yea I didn’t mean I swim like Hackett, but that’s the style of hand entry I do. Once my arm gets back to about my head, my forearm is nice and vertical and my elbow is high, but I can’t seem to catch as much water in that initial part of the stroke where my hand is at peak extension.
is thanks i hadn’t heard of it before so i was curious (mostly about hip rotation during the drill)
I cant say that i agree with the results you have found personally, although everyone will have a different stroke and an optimized position due to their physical abilities and anatomy. The full stroke and pull down to me is the more efficient stroke it will always be. There should be no pause in your stroke even at full extension. This drill to me is a hard drill because it destroys basic stroke components. like finishing your pull which helped me as a swimmer drop 15-20 seconds in my mile over a summer season (before taper).
From your stroke assesment (hard to really say without seeing it so dont take anything i say to be negative), it seems like your hands are not in the right position on your recover if you are rotating them at the peak of your stroke. your hands should always be in the pull position this is accomplished by your body rotation. If there is a pause in your stroke it may be that you are thinking about extension to much.
Again its hard to say which is better because honestly some will perform better with a higher cadence and some with a lower, but the stroke should still be a full stroke maximizing your pull time in the water per revolution of the body.
This is in stark contrast to some advice I received from a well respected coach who said to work on reaching as far forward as possible to maximise the length of the catch.
I think this is misunderstood/misinterpreted. Throwing your arms as far forward as possible is just as much or even more so for creating a good glide. Lots of swimming is not done with the pull, but everywhere else with the body. Quit focusing on how far out you can grab a fistfull of water and instead stretch out your arm to compliment the pull coming from the other arm.
Watch fast breast strokers and you’ll see there’s a long glide after the kick, arms full out to the max. There’s no pulling going on there for a measurable amount of time.
Not a stupid question at all. Reaching far forward is fine as long as you don’t drop your elbow. What that “sewing machine” drill is teaching you is how to keep your elbow close to the surface of the water and your arm bent close to 90 degrees at the elbow during the pull. I’m not totally sure why this is such a big deal, but it is. Some people say the high elbow uses more back muscles and less of the weak shoulder muscles in the pull. Others say that it reduces the frontal area presented to the water moving forward. Maybe it’s a bit of both.
Anyway, dropping the elbow and straightening the arm means that your shoulder muscles are having to push that whole arm through the water. However if you reach and then bend at the elbow first, then pull, you’ll be a lot faster. I do the following:
Reach far forward, rotating the opposite hip to the top of the water with a kick
Bend at the wrist to point the hand/fingers at the bottom of the pool
Bend at the elbow to point the forearm/hand/fingers at the bottom of the pool
Begin pulling using the back muscles, keeping the forearm/hand position the same during the pull
Keep the elbow close to the top of the water throughout 1-4
There is a really good coach named Marc Evans on youtube that talks about this. Watching his videos has improved my swimming quite a bit. Here’s a good one to start:
I was doing sewing machine drills today and noticed that I was actually faster doing the drill then when swimming normally. I think its because my arm is entering the water in the catch position already right as my other arm is finishing pulling, so there is no break in the power.
This is in stark contrast to some advice I received from a well respected coach who said to work on reaching as far forward as possible to maximise the length of the catch.
So which is it? Does your reach increase the faster you go (indicating targeting a specific cadence is more important)?
I suspect that your respected coach is applying swim techniques that may not be appropriate for triathlon swimming.
While it is true that one should reach far forward to maximise the catch, this works well if you are kicking very strongly and are very hydrodynamic. It doesn’t work so well if not, since you will rapidly lose speed while gliding into that long reach. Most triathletes don’t (and I don’t think they should) kick much for propulsion, therefore they need to maintain pulling as much of the time as possible: gliding is bad. So your sewing machine drill minimises (love that Brit spelling!) dead time in your stroke.
One solution is to recover out of the water further, so your arm is nearly straight when it enters the water, and thus is much closer to the desired full extension.
Here is a red flag.
The initial phase of the catch does not involved the elbow moving at all.
You are in the full extension, your forearm drops (using the elbow as the fixed point) to near vertical, then you start to power through your stroke and using your entire arm (elbow moves now).
Oh, I just remembered what I think is the big reason that “high elbow” swimming is faster. If you drop your elbow, your arm rotates around the shoulder joint. As it moves from the surface of the water down, its movement vector has a vertical (towards the bottom of the pool) and horizontal (towards the back of the pool) component. With a dropped elbow (i.e. “straight arm” pull), the horizontal component of the movement vector isn’t maximized throughout the movement. In fact, you don’t even get 100% of the movement vector as horizontal until it reaches 90 degress (pointed to the bottom of the pool). By bending the wrist first, then the elbow, then pulling, you ensure that the vertical component of the movement vector is minimized. This is wasted energy (it is pushing down on the water, not back), so you want to minimize it. You want as much of the movement vector to be horizontal (propulsive) as possible.
So maybe the reason you’re faster swimming the “sewing machine” drill is because you are pushing a lot of water down and not back in your regular stroke. Your pull may be a “straight arm” pull…
with my arm in full extension with my shoulder dropped, my elbow is pointing outward and slightly down. I can’t drop my arm straight down without moving my elbow laterally away form me. Also, as your shoulders open up during the roll, doesn’t that push your elbow outward?
That’s the reason for vertical forearm, before any elbow movement.
To maximize the horizontal force of the pull, you maximize your surface area with a vertical forearm.
If you swim like a windmill (where the elbow drops constantly), a lot of your energy is going into vertical force (not useful for swimming straight)
Yoga
or years of swimming as a child will help.
You can drop the forearm with a fixed elbow, it requires a twist of the shoulder (that most people don’t hav
Unfortunately, flexible shoulders for swimming is long term process.
Matt. It is true that you want to maintain constant pressure on the water to maintain constant velocity. It is inefficient to accelerate/decelerate with each stroke.
But let’s not assume from this that a long stroke necessarily results in deceleration. You should be able to achieve recovery, entry and full reach before you other arm has finished the pull. If your catch/pull is not catching enough water, it can cut through the water and finish too soon. Could that be happening with your ‘normal’ stroke?
And when you say that you were swimming faster doing this drill…for what distance? I doubt you’d find it faster for 200+ meters.
There is only one thing that matters in swimming and that is how much power you can covert into foward motion over a given period of time. In that regard, swimming is no different than any other activity that revolves around speed whether it is running, cycling, drag racing, etc. ALL swimming advice, tips, etc are related to this one fundemantal fact. There are 3 basic ways to improve power application: get stronger/ build a better engine, apply more power over the stroke cycle (ie get a better catch (more power goes to forward motion) and/or lengthen the portion of the stroke where power is being applied and finally; reduce drag.
Ideally, you want a long stroke coupled with the ability to appy effective power over most if not all of the length of the stroke couple with a great low drag body position. But to say a long stroke is ALWAYS faster is just not true given the physics and bio mechanics involved in swimming generally and with individual swimmers in particular.
So, keeping that in mind, why is a longer stoke “better?” Its better IF you can apply more power over a longer period of time per stroke. But, this depends on your ability to catch since the catch is like the traction in a drag racer’s tire. The fastest drag racer is not the one with the most horsepower but the one that can put the most horsepower on the road. A big engine and crappy tires will usually lose to a good engine and great tires.
The drill you are doing appears, for you, to result in a better catch, but over a shorter length then a long stroke. this probably would not be the case for a better swimmer but, your particular stroke results in the anomoly that you can apply more total power over time with this weird drill than you can with a “regular” long stroke. That is why you can go faster doing the drill. (A longer stroke is not always faster. In fact, sprinters often shorten their strokes to acheive higher speeds over a short period of time at the expense of efficiency.)
You need to work on being able to take that catch you are getting with this drill and replicate it over a longer stroke. I’ve never heard of this drill you are doing but undoubtably, that is its purpose. Basically, the drill is designed to help you build yourself a better set of tires. Liek most swimming drils, it trains you to feel a good catch and what position you have to be in to get it. You got one part down so now take what you have learned and apply it to your full stroke.
I’m only doing the drill for 25 m at a time… The more I think about it as well, it might just feel faster due to the higher turnover or because I accelerate up to speed faster.
My fitness is actually pretty poor at the moment as this is only my second week back in the water after about 8 months off, but I do notice that when I first get in, I have about 500 yards of faster times where I just feel smooth and efficient. Once I fatigue though, things start to slow down, which is when I do my drill work. So I’m sure something in my normal stroke is breaking down due to fatigue that this drill is targeting and fixing. One interesting thing is that I can always tell that I’m starting to get tired before I really feel it because my breathing suddenly awkward (so there’s probably a body position/core stabilization issue in there somewhere too).
